You can sort of see the Jacksonville Jaguars’ point of view in their increasingly-hostile contract stalemate with Maurice Jones-Drew.

Hey, they seem to be thinking, you might have rushed for 1,600 yards and outgained every back in the NFL, including all the ones who signed for bigger deals in the last couple of years. But we went 5-11 with you; we can go 5-11 without you.

Sure, we also fired two head coaches with you … and sold the team … and tarped-over unsold seats again … and sold one home game each over the next four seasons to London … and have the world believing we’re on our way to L.A. eventually … and we can do all that without you, too.

Yeah, the Jaguars are really dealing from a position of strength, here.

Who needs a guy with the talent, production, drive and personality like MJD, when the franchise is as rock-solid as this one?

The problem for Jones-Drew, of course, is that as needy as the Jaguars seem—and as much as their still fairly-new owner, Shad Khan, needs everybody to believe the opposite—he simply has very little leverage.

He has his huge numbers, and the knowledge that 5-11 was far from his fault. Neither were the weekly local TV blackouts; the coaching change; the clumsy and possibly premature transition to a new franchise quarterback; nor the skepticism about where (literally) the franchise was going.

Jones-Drew’s team shows up in Baltimore for Thursday’s third preseason game/dress rehearsal without him—so, regardless of how the Jaguars do, it will be impossible to evaluate who they are, because no one knows if the team with him or the team without him will take the field when the games start to count.

But he also knows that more and more every season, the NFL doesn’t value running backs, that it genuinely looks at them like buses (you miss one and another comes along in a few minutes), that it would rather invest in a quarterback than in the fragile nature of his position … and that nearly every back who has gotten paid recently had to be backed all the way to the wall before getting that pile of dough.

In the wake of Chris Johnson, Arian Foster, Ray Rice and Matt Forte, Jones-Drew knew this was possible. Once he committed to holding out of training camp, he had to know the other side wasn’t going to cave easily.

The Jaguars and Khan have stood their ground. They’ve risked looking foolish, greedy and reactionary. What Khan thought he would accomplish with his remarks lately is exceedingly fuzzy: “The train is leaving the station. Run. Get on it.”

“Believe me, on a zero-to-10 level of stress, this doesn’t even move the needle.’’

“This is not a team by one person.”

OK, so Khan wins the snappy-retort contest and earns him points in the arrogant-owner sweepstakes, which apparently is important to him, more so than having a satisfied star player in uniform. It’s a contract dispute, pretty standard stuff in this business—until one side makes it personal, as Khan appears to have done.

But, as is generally the case in these situations, Khan says things like this because … he can.

MJD’s camp responded as expected—he is now open to a trade, according to reports. It’s now a matter of “respect,” as his agent put it in an Associated Press report Tuesday.

Don’t let it be about that. What Khan and the Jaguars respect, they’ve made clear, is the contract with two years left on it, and the leverage it gives them.

They would hardly be the first team to hurt itself to prove a point. They’d see it as a victory to play without Jones-Drew all year if it means they get their way on his demands—even if it also means they settle into the bottom of the AFC South, where they would have been last season if the Colts had a legit quarterback, even this year’s quarterback.

It’s hard to buy the Jaguars’ public position that they’re just fine without the one proven, electrifying, game-changing player they have on offense. But take their word for it when they say they won’t trade Jones-Drew. They don’t have to. Not now. It’s sadly true that even with him, they’re not expected to be anything special this season.

It’s also true that other teams aren’t going to offer a lot for him—because they’ve proven they value backs, even the great ones, as poorly as the Jaguars do. They won’t get comparable return for MJD. Blaine Gabbert, their second-year, former first-round quarterback, has proven zilch yet, and he’d probably pull more in a trade, the way the NFL now operates.

In taking the lead for Hard-Headed Front Office of the Year honors, the Jaguars are making their point of view crystal-clear.

It’s not a good point of view, or a helpful one, or a fair one to their best player. But it’s their point, and they’re sticking to it.